Writings on various topics (mostly technical) from Oliver Hookins and Angela Collins. We currently reside in Sydney after almost a decade in Berlin, have three kids, and have far too little time to really justify having a blog.
Every so often when I'm talking about the relative merits of Scrum or Kanban, or Agile software development in general, I find myself brought back to the few books I've read on the subject which really resonated with me and gave me plenty of interesting ideas for what to try, when faced with workflow difficulties. In the last five years, I've worked on or with at least ten different teams - either…
The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim is the latest book to cross my desk, after a last-minute mad rush end-of-financial-year order of a few different books from my education budget. Expect a few more upcoming reviews soon, hopefully!
I've already read The Phoenix Project a few years ago, although I realise now I've forgotten many of the details. The Unicorn Project is something of a sister story, or…
The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni is the latest book I've gotten through, and also a bit of a compilation of all of Patrick's previous works. Very early on when I first started managing teams, I read his other book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team which I still recommend and really enjoyed reading (a few times over). Really these books are aimed at leadership groups (think executives at a medium to…
It Doesn't Have To Be Crazy At Work by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson is the latest ebook to cross my desk. I read their previous books ReWork and Remote recently after we moved to the working from home situation and got hooked on their writing style. In many ways, this one (I'm not going to repeat the full title again) feels like a rehashing of ReWork - although it was published quite…
Rework: Change The Way You Work Forever by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson.
First off, I have to acknowledge the fact that these last few reviews have definitely not been "micro"-sized. They've made their way solidly up to "mini" and possibly even ... whatever comes after that. Regular? I think the intent was more to express how much effort I wanted to put in rather than the content…
Remote by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
It's probably no surprise to anybody that I just read this book, and I expect many other people have recently, or will soon, read it as well given the current global pandemic looming over us. Many people will have recently bought the book as the authors made it free (I think the tweet has now been deleted as I couldn't find it) but in any case…
Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux. Wow, what a book. I've had this sitting on the bookshelf for a couple of years and finally got around to reading it in the last couple of months. When it comes to books around the theme of management, the most interesting books are the ones that completely challenge and change my existing ways of thinking, or the ones that fully resonate and amplify…
Who Moved My Cheese? by Dr Spencer Johnson is another book mentioned to me last year (I think by my manager). It sounds like a book I already knew about, but maybe that is because of the conventional and obvious sounding title. And the content is obvious, in many ways - it's an allegory for change management.
As the tale goes, four mice with strange names are feasting on cheese and then the…
One Minute Mentoring by Ken Blanchard and Claire Diaz-Ortiz is one of the well-respected One Minute Manager series by Ken Blanchard. Ken Blanchard himself has started a series of companies that specialise in management training and techniques - such as Situational Leadership II.
I still have it on my list to read the original One Minute Manager, and assumed it was just a "basics" guide to the…
Turn The Ship Around by L. David Marquet is something that had been on my radar (no pun intended) for some time, but was also recommended to me early last year by my then manager. The context was - how to delegate more in the journey in leadership to higher levels of management. I think at the time I was trying to come to grips with the team I had at the time, which was doing a lot of difficult…
Another book completed from the never-ending list: Zero to One by Peter Thiel. Not sure how this ended up on the list but I guess it's a seminal text when considering tech startups, which have featured pretty solidly in my career.
I probably saw it on the shelf at one of the companies I worked, and thought it deserved a read. In any case, I expected something more about founding and running…
My blog count for last year was woefully low, and I was struggling to think of what was worthwhile to write about. As I mentioned last time, I've been slowly getting through my management/leadership reading list and while I don't think I have the time or energy to write full book reviews (at least, full enough to do the titles justice) I would like to write something.
So here it is: the first of…
Oh dear, it's been another long time since my last post. To be fair, this year has been very hectic. Earlier in the year I was focussing a lot more on spending my commutes meditating (somewhat successfully), but recently I've found that reading on the train and in whatever free time I can scrape together has almost the same effect - so I don't mind meditating less.
When I was in primary school I took part regularly in the MS Read-a-thon - much less for the fundraising aspect as for the reading aspect. I was a mad reader. I think in the month or so of the read-a-thon I managed one year to crank through around 35 books. Admittedly these weren't exactly Ulysses-sized or complexity, but I think that's a…
Well, I've certainly had a lot less free time to write blog posts recently. I don't even have my actual desktop computer back in operation yet (the screen was cracked in transit). We have finally moved into an apartment in Sydney and life is returning to some definition of normal. With three kids and a new job there is a lot to balance, and not a lot of time for many things.
That being said, I've…